Question

I made a regex to remove whitespaces and other garbage such as new lines and tabs.

preg_replace('/[\s\t\n\r]+/mu', ' ', $var);

However my string is html encoded, which means I get some chars replaced with &#…;

What could we do to account for the encoded chars as well?

Answer 1

I wonder if it’s possible to make quantifiers like that to the groups.

preg_replace('/(\s|	| )+/mu', ' ', $var)

Edit

Yes, this appears to be working:

$str='  t 	     e 	  	  	  s	t	  ';

echo '|'.preg_replace('/(\s|	| )+/mu',' ',$str).'|';

^ produces the expected result: | t e s t |